Look Who's Killing Now...

Summary:
Picks up 65 years after the day Bella found the meadow in New Moon, but it was not Laurent that showed up. It was Victoria, and her plan for Bella was not to kill her, but to change her as that was a sacrifice Edward was never willing to make. Bella's change left her with no memory of her human life, including the Cullen's, and as such she never met up with them. What has she been doing, and what will happen when she meets up with her past? Read to find out.

Notes:
S. Meyer owns Twilight. I own my boredom.

1. Chapter 1

I ran as fast as I could, flying through the tunnels of the city. It had been too long since I last hunted, and I could feel myself being pulled in a thousand different directions by the scent of the people above me.

“Tourists…” I muttered to myself. St. Marcus Day always brought an inordinate amount of people into the city, and this year was no different. Even though I have spent to past 64 years here, the irony of the celebration has never failed to give me humor. I was summoned by Aro a year after my change, enlisted into his guard for my ‘capability’. While the majority of the vampires in the city prefer to relax and have their meals delivered to them, I have never been much for take-out. I prefer the hunt: stalk, chase, kill. Since eating all the tourists would likely get me ripped into pieces by the rest of the guard, despite Aro’s preference for me, I had to wait until I was in the country side to feed.

I was a few hundred miles outside of the city walls when I saw a group of Parisian students taking a tour of one of the dozens of churches in the area. I wasn’t really in the mood for French, but I would take what I could get. Their combined scents were delicious: spicy, musky and sweet all mixed together. One of the students, a young male, had separated from the rest of the group. It seemed he was more interested in the architecture of the building than the artwork that is hung inside. It was almost too easy, like a delivered kill instead of a hunt, but by that point I wasn’t in the mood to look for a more challenging meal. I crept up to the side of the church slowly using my arms and my legs like a spider climbing up a wall. I walked over to the side of the building, giving myself pause to watch him adore the view as the sun went down behind the hills. At least the last thing he would see would be a beautiful vision.

I was intrigued by him. I spent my entire vampire life feeling as though there was something on the fringe of my memory: something from my human life that was just out of my grasp. I remembered only a few details from my human existence. My parents’ images were both seared into my memory, never to be forgotten. There were also random memories that did not make sense; rather that did not have any context to make sense in. A meadow. A forest floor. And a smell, no, a scent that I couldn’t accurately describe if I tried. Other than those small details, my human life was non-existent. Aro has told me that it is a normal occurrence, that human memories are based on human senses that are so simplistic compared to the senses I now have that the memories are ‘weak’. Demetri thinks our selective memories are more self-determined. The good, important things from our lives we choose to carry over. The inconsequential things and the memories that are too painful, we leave behind us purposefully, as not to burden us in our new existence. Regardless, the majority of my life as a human has been lost to me, including the piece of my human life that I have spent too much time focusing on if, for no other reason, than that it is damn annoying that I can feel it’s presence in my mind but have been completely unable to bring it into light.

This ordinary man seemed to make that forgotten memory burn: made it feel as though at any moment my entire human life would be thrust into the forefront of my mind, never to be forgotten. I wanted to watch him, to follow him throughout his journeys until the memory cleared, but I could hear his classmates getting restless inside. It was either take this man now, or deal with having to kill them all and cleaning up the mess to hide the massacre. For a brief moment before I pounced, I questioned what it was about this ordinary man that made my memory burn. Did I know him? Was he somehow related to a human friend? Was he family? It didn’t matter now. The people from my past were strangers, save my mother and father. Aro had trained me as much. ‘But still, I wonder…’ I thought to myself just moments before I pounced down from the roof.

After I dragged his lifeless body into the hills, I allowed myself a moment to study his face; a last moment to try and force the memory. He was just an ordinary man. He had a very defined face, and a strong bone-structure. He had reddish-brown hair that was completely mad, sticking up in every direction with no sense of order. It looked vibrant against his pale skin. He wasn’t skinny, but wasn’t big, either. He had good muscle definition, but wasn’t ‘ripped’. I chuckled at my mental use of Demetri’s word to describe himself. By the time I gave up on recalling the memory, the sun had been buried for hours. I didn’t know him, and I couldn’t figure out what it was about him that gave me a pull. I reached for his wallet to see what money he had, a typical action after a kill, and caught a glimpse of his I.D. It seemed he was an exchange student from the United States. ‘Bradley Masen’.

“And I am still completely clueless,” I said to myself as I pocketed my money and headed back to Volterra.